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The Great Island
three-day struggle. Prayers on the ninth day help him and fortify
him after his visit to the scene of his good and evil deeds on earth.
Prayers on the fortieth day fortify him for the moment when he pays
homage to God.
This is a late explanation. (It is a sixteenth or seventeenth-century
manuscript.) I suspect that the memorial kollyva are offered not only to
help the soul but also to placate it; for a person may haunt the earth
until the fortieth day after his death, and if he is not properly buried
he may become a vampire.
The baby we saw last night cried all through the night, so this morn-
ing we had to spit on her in case one of us had put the evil eye on her.
(Blue eyes or over-complimentary remarks may affect a child even
without any guilty intent.)
In the evening, one of those rather childish conversations about the
desirability of our marrying Mesklans. The naïveté of it is a bit irritating.
Perhaps I am envious because I imagine them to be shielded from
some of the peculiar horrors of this century. Their horrors are the ageold
ones, things that they can touch and feel, like cracking bones and
disease and the last war, with its hunger and death. Ours seem to be
more creeping, abstract things, and in the last resort annihilation.
Their peace correspondingly is something which they can touch and
feel, like warm earth. And ours, it seems, is hovering always just out of
reach, and if we catch it it is as fragile as a butterfly’s wing.
(And yet the incidence of mental diseases in poor and primitive
societies is generally higher than in sophisticated ones. The paragraph
above suffers from what might be called Arcady disease.)
I June. The doctor tells me the etymological legend. Meskla was the
headquarters of Kandanoleon, and some of the unfortunate Greeks
who were executed after the wedding were buried here. A bush called
mousklia grew from their tomb; and this word, corrupted, became
Meskla, the village.
Julie heard from Antigone, our hostess, a story of the powers of St
Nektarios, who died quite recently on Aegina. A girl from Meskla – it
turned out later to be the hearty Antigone herself – had a bad cough.
She became so ill that she decided to go to Aegina to get help from the
saint. She promised him presents of oil, but without effect; she returned
to Crete just as ill. The cough had troubled her now for over a year, and
her mother forced her to go to the doctor at Heraklion. Just as he was
about to give her an injection, the needle broke. A sign from the saint
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